Mozilla and Google have announced WebRTC RTCPeerConnection interoperability between Firefox and Chrome.
In blog posts ‘Hello Chrome, it’s Firefox calling!’ and ‘Hello Firefox, this is Chrome calling!’, the two companies showed a video of how the two browsers can now ‘talk’ to each other, with high-quality video and in a secure fashion, without the need for plug-ins.
Serge Lachapelle, Chrome product manager, remarked that the open web community has embraced the WebRTC effort. He added that the close collaboration between the Chrome and Firefox teams led to a common goal to “help developers offer rich, secure communications, integrated directly into their web applications”.
Mozilla referred to the announcement as a “major milestone in WebRTC development”.
Maire Reavy, Firefox media product lead, said WebRTC is an open standard that’s “defined jointly at the W3C and IETF standards organisations”, and the eventual goal is to “provide a common platform for all user devices to communicate and share audio, video and data in real-time”. She said this was a “first step toward that vision of interoperability and true, open, real-time communication on the web”.
To try WebRTC yourself on the demo site, you can use Chrome 25 Beta for desktop and Firefox Nightly for desktop. In Firefox, you need to set media.peerconnection.enabled to true in about:config.
For more information about the topic, read .net’s article on how to get started with WebRTC.
